Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture

The buildings and writings of Adolf Loos (1870–1933) are now often enough taken, or mistaken, in the cultural sphere, as exemplary of an early modern iconoclasm which, if not downright nihilistic, was out to deny art as such, as if with some Dadaist form of anti-architecture. In spite of a longstanding interest in Duchamp, I always suspected that Loos was something more than simply the Duchamp of architecture; but how so? Considering aspects of his contribution, the present book offers makings of an answer. Not that Loos wasn’t iconoclastic; but his was the witty and knowing iconoclasm of the believer, on behalf of the great art of architecture. Against the commonplace of Loos as mere ironist, part of the history of architecture possibly only as a critical curmudgeon clearing the way to modernism rather than as building and advancing it, the following thematic essays take off from the assumption that as a practitioner Loos belongs as much to the history of art as any other great modern artist.